


Exigencies

by A Kiss of Fire (TigerDragon)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Always-a-girl!Lestrade, Ambiguous Relationships, Compromise, Espionage, Estrangement, F/F, F/M, Forgiveness, Inspired by Fanfiction, Multi, Reunions, Sleeping Together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-11
Updated: 2013-11-11
Packaged: 2018-01-01 05:15:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1040775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/A%20Kiss%20of%20Fire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anthea has always prided herself on the quiet efficiency of her service to Mycroft Holmes. The idea that he might fall in love never crossed her mind, much less that the woman with whom he fell in love would be DI Georgiana Lestrade or that somehow, in the mad progress of that prelude to a disaster, she might find herself compromised.</p><p>That she might find herself making mistakes she would do anything - anything in the world - to correct.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Exigencies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rageprufrock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rageprufrock/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Least of All Possible Mistakes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/330685) by [rageprufrock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rageprufrock/pseuds/rageprufrock). 



> When I finished reading Pru's absolutely astonishing _The Least of All Possible Mistakes_ , which every one of you out there ought to read (and judging by the hit count, most of you have), I was giddy and exhausted from reading for ten hours straight. I also had an idea, a niggling unresolved detail that I couldn't let go of, something I've never experience from a fan-derived work before. That I only rarely experience with art of any kind. They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so I hope that Pru finds it as great a compliment as I mean it to be that I sat down and wrote a little fill-in-the-blanks around the architecture of _Possible Mistakes_ to answer my lingering questions about a Blackberry, a gun, sleeping arrangements, and what exactly happens to the world's quickest thumb-typing assistant after Chapter 11. 
> 
> Pru, if you're reading this, thank you. So much. I couldn't begin to fit how much I loved your story into a comment, so here it is in prose instead. London must love you back - I don't see how it could help it.

Anthea is in the employ of the British Government, in the person of Mycroft Holmes, for whatever exigencies he may require. Those words have been her mission statement, her guiding mantra since completing her training, and in rare moments of introspection she will admit - if only to herself - that she rather likes them. That there is something deeply, wordlessly satisfying about putting herself, on a day to day basis, at the service of a man who embodies everything she loves about her country. He is quiet, composed, a master of self-command, a gentleman almost to a fault, slightly fussy, duty-bound to the core and as dangerous when pressed as any man on Earth. She knows all of these things about him because she has been his assistant, his right hand and his weapon for more than half her adult life.

Until a year ago, that fact suited her perfectly. Until Sherlock Holmes turned the comfortable efficiency of the house on Lyall Street where George Lestrade made her feel at home for the first time she can remember into a gaping hole in the map of London far more effectively than any well-placed explosives could have.

Until her silent arguments with her employer became about a single, unresolvable problem which neither of them could accept the other’s solution to.

Detective Inspector - it’s Detective Chief Inspector, now - Georgiana Lestrade.

He didn’t take her to the morgue with him. Now, in retrospect, she thinks that perhaps she should have demanded to go. Insisted. But that has never been the tenor of their working relationship, and so she said nothing. Did nothing. She waited until he came back, lips bruised and clothing still disarranged, and told her that Sherlock Holmes was still alive and Moriarty was dead. That Moriarty’s network endured, and Sherlock would use his ‘death’ to hunt them. That he’d broken things off with George to protect her, given her the house, and that it was very likely that neither of them would ever be returning to that house.

She remembers, for the first time in their working relationship, being unable to acknowledge his instructions. Not unwilling, not resentful but duty-bound, but genuinely unable. There were no words then, either, but he read her objections in the widening of her eyes and the tick at the corner of her mouth and she read his trapped, miserable conviction in the way he straightened himself to loom over her, the way he dabbed the blood away from his mouth with a handkerchief.

Anthea was in the employ of the British Government, in the person of Mycroft Holmes, for whatever exigencies he might require. Even these. Every line of her body a protest, she set about making the necessary arrangements. False papers for Sherlock, the transfer of the house into George’s name, a safehouse for her employer while she located more suitable permanent housing for him. Suitably invisible protection and surveillance on the house and on New Scotland Yard.

The night he sent her to return George’s things to her - all the little things he’d stolen from her in the box, and all the intangible things left out - she hated him for the first time. Just a little, but enough that she felt it like a knife in her chest. Enough to take her balance from her, so that she had to wear the flats from the trunk to the door. There was no hiding the evidence of her tears or her exhaustion, so that night she didn’t try.

“Was that it? Is that everything?” Georgiana asked her, pale and still and tight in a way that made Anthea’s hands ache to slide into hers, to offer some kind of comfort, to open up her chest and spill out all the secrets locked up inside her, to betray herself utterly if it would take some of that hurt away.

She’d tried to explain that this was worse than murder and theft and blackmail and explosives and poisons, tried to apologize, and the tears that had spilled down George’s cheek had come close to washing her away entirely. She tried to apologize with her mouth, and that wasn’t enough. Nearly enough. “I can’t give you what you want. I can’t give you what you need.” Small, pitiful, stupid words. She remembered the first things that George had ever asked her for, then, and since she didn’t have a pony at hand, she did what she’d dreamed about doing a hundred times since that night at the Ritz. What her employer might well still have her killed for doing if he saw the surveillance of this.

She kissed George. Kissed the older woman softly and slowly, memorizing the line of her cheeks with her palms, the taste of her mouth with her lips, the scent of her, the heat of her skin. Everything. Clung to her, spilling meaningless words of helpless apology, shaking with the need to confess everything.

“It’s fine,” George told her, holding her, soothing her in unfamiliar ways that her skin cried out to her not to pull away from. “I’m okay - thank you for coming.”

Meaningless words, from anyone else. From George ... from George, they were the stoppers that keep Anthea from spilling everything she is and knows on the floor at the feet of her employer’s former lover and destroying herself in the process.

“I have to go,” she thinks she said, repeating the words over and over in her head so loudly they must have spilled past her lips.

“It’s all right - you’ll be all right. It’s fine,” George comforted her, not knowing all the days Anthea has already been betraying her, and Anthea did the only thing she could do. She ran. She’s stood her ground against the most dangerous enemies of her country thousands of miles from England, but on the doorstep of the house in Lyall Street that wasn’t home anymore, Georgiana Lestrade sent her bolting for the car.

She doesn’t know how she had the gall to slip up beside George at Sherlock’s funeral and slip a hand into hers, how she could presume to give George the comfort she wanted instead of the truth she needed, but she did. Her employer was too wrapped up in his own miserable hurt to lash out at her for it. Maybe she wanted him to. She still doesn’t know.

She knows, now, that that moment on the doorstep was the moment she stopped feeling any satisfaction in her work.

But Anthea was in the employ of the British Government, in the person of Mycroft Holmes, for whatever exigencies he might require, and she knew her duties. So she carried on with them, because there was nothing else she could imagine doing, and she spent hours watching George - drinking on the balcony of the house at Lyall, shuttling back and forth to NSY to face the endless grinding uselessness of the inquiry into Sherlock’s involvement with the police, drinking with John at the little pub. Sometimes she cried. Sometimes she just watched.

Sharp enough to cut herself on it, she remembers almost pleading with George to back off her investigation into Sherlock’s death and Moriarty’s people, defending Mycroft in spite of herself in the desperate hope that it would make George safer and let someone _else_ put their head in the lion’s mouth. Remembers the hard, angry way George shut her down and hung up on her.

She’d deserved that. Deserved worse. But she’d been almost as desperate as Mycroft by then to see George out of harm’s way, desperate enough to work with Sherlock god damn Holmes directly to push the investigation forward. They broke rules, speed limits and bones together, and they still weren't fast enough. Not good enough.

George beat them to it. Patient, methodical, plodding George was the one who figured it out, who slapped a legal pad scrawled in Sharpie against her window to tell the surveillance team and the snipers who the target, the inside man had been the whole time.

Sebastian Moran.

Anthea doesn’t know, even now, if she’s ever run that fast in her life, even when the VEVAK teams were trying to close the Iranian border ahead of her. She still wasn’t in time. Not really.

Even shooting Moran in both knees and pistol-whipping him into unconsciousness doesn’t begin to make up for that terrible, agonizing moment of watching George fold to the ground in a pool of her own blood, watching her eyes focus for a fraction of a second on Anthea herself as she took her shots and then close like it might be the last time.

If she is very, very lucky, the memory of kneeling in a pool of George’s blood and pressing her fingers into bloody ruin to try to slow the bleeding, trying to hold Georgiana Lestrade in the world long enough for the paramedics to arrive and have a chance to save her - if she’s lucky, that memory will eventually slip through her fingers. It will stop being the first thing she sees when her brain rouses in the morning, before her eyes open, and the last thing she sees before her mind shuts down for the night.

She tells herself that often. Sometimes she believes it.

The first time her Blackberry chimed for attention, while she was sitting there in the waiting area outside the ER while John Watson and a scratch team of surgeons tried to put George’s insides back together with twine and surgical tape, she almost threw it against the wall. Almost. But because it was government property, because _she_ had been government property until sometime before her hands were covered in George’s blood, she didn’t.

She turned it off instead.

She and Mycroft have never discussed the fact that, technically, she abandoned her post that evening. That, in fact, she went absolutely absent without leave for the entire two weeks that George spent in the hospital before having the conversation with Sherlock that Anthea had been dreading from the moment she knew her employer’s young brother was not actually dead. She spent those entire two weeks, other than a few runs to her apartment to get clothes or to Waitrose for supplies, either sitting in the corner of George’s room or close enough to the bed that she was practically laying in it. She ate an absurd amount of Haribo, crushed every available challenge in every little game she could load onto her iPad, and was never, never unarmed.

It was a little pointless, of course. Closing the barn door after the horse had left and gotten shot. But she couldn’t, simply couldn’t, bring herself to leave the self-imposed purgatory of waiting. Waiting for George to heal, waiting for her to need something Anthea could give, waiting for her to find out the truth and banish Anthea from her presence forever.

When Sherlock told her, when George asked her if she’d known about Mycroft’s deception and the protective cruelty of him abandoning her, there was never a question of lying. Not anymore. She couldn’t say anything, but didn’t have to - she just waited, giving Georgiana her eyes and bracing herself for the sky to fall in on her head.

Even now, when she thinks about it, she can’t quite fit her mind around how George managed to forgive and absolve her with twelve words.

“I don’t want to stay here anymore,” she said. “I want to go home.”

It was a task, an order, a need she could fill, all the welcome back into the circle of George’s heart that she needed. From the moment it was said, she knew she was going to do it. It was only a question of how. Fortunately, Anthea has a lot of experience with methodology useful in accomplishing the seeming impossible. When it came to extracting George from the hospital and returning her to Lyall Street, she had been instantly prepared to use all of it.

She stayed in the chair she moved from the bathroom at first - Mycroft’s chair, which she still tries not to contemplate the symbolism of. It was impractical, to try to watch over George every hour of the day, but she couldn’t bring herself to care about the absurdities of the desire. At the moment George had forgiven her, had given her permission to be of service again, everything else had shrunk to insignificance. The Blackberry stayed turned off in her pocket, displaced by the iPad she and George shared games on, and eventually her place migrated from the chair to the bed beside George. Eventually, without her ever quite intending it to happen, she was sleeping in that bed more nights than not.

Two weeks after she’d brought George back home, a full month after turning off her Blackberry, she turned it back on. George was in the kitchen with Sherlock at the time, and somehow it seemed like the right time. There were, of course, an absurd number of urgent and time-critical messages. She ignored them. She brought up the text function, instead, and selected Mycroft’s number.

 _This is Anthea,_ she typed. _Recovery progressing. Visitors plentiful. House secure._

In the kitchen, Sherlock squeaked. Her Blackberry hissed. _Understood. Continue present assignment. MH._

There was an interruption when Sherlock and George attempted to take George up the stairs without proper precautions, which required corrective action with the assistance of Gillian Lestrade and extensive explanations on how dreadfully reckless George was being with herself. Then, once George was in bed and Sherlock was hovering, there was the matter of heading off Gillian’s efforts at making a fish pie by ordering takeaway. _Your brother is endangering George’s recovery,_ she typed as she started back up the stairs again with a bucket of Starmix in the crook of her arm.

_Lethal force is authorized. MH._

“I have permission to shoot to kill.” Those were her first words to Sherlock, and they were sufficient to banish him a hurry. George looked at her with amusement, then winced at the mention of fish pie. Smiled when Anthea reassured her that takeaway was already enroute. Anthea didn’t really mean to slide into bed, just then, but the softness of that smile drew her in. Made her kick off her heels and reach for the iPad.

George was asleep against her shoulder in a matter of minutes. She didn’t even think of trying to get back out of the bed, takeaway or not.

She made few reports to Mycroft in the following months. He made few inquiries. The flood of messages she normally sorted for him vanished from her phone, replaced by the steady trickle of reports from the security team and periodic directives to bring George a blanket or more water that told her he was watching.

Anthea might have been in the employ of the British Government, in the person of Mycroft Holmes, but for the first time in her life she had a competing set of priorities. George’s priorities.

The day George finally invited Mycroft back into the house, Anthea was at the Waitrose for weekly supplies, picking over the vegetable offerings in the search for the best of the selection. Neither of them texted her to warn her, to tell her, but she knew the moment she got out of the car and saw Mycroft’s security team intermingled with George’s. There were a few seconds of cold, lingering anger - she remembers them distinctly - and then relief. Profound, knee-weakening relief.

She didn’t go upstairs to interrupt them. She didn’t cry at the thought of not crawling in George’s bed that night. She put the groceries up, settled herself on the couch downstairs and played Angry Birds until she was too tired to stay awake.

The wedding was three months, two weeks and five days later. Anthea planned it herself, of course, because the newly christened Detective Chief Inspector Lestrade was entirely too busy to be bothered with it and Mycroft Holmes could not be left in charge of such a task lest the whole business become a Victorian farce. It was a considerable operation, in the end, but she’s still pleased by how well the whole business came off. Not a single rough edge in sight, other than the inevitable carping from the younger brother of the groom.

When the driver let the three of them out at the house on Lyall Street, she was already anticipating her dismissal for the night so keenly that Mycroft’s pause on the doorstep before he unlocked the door nearly made her miss a step. “I’ve a wedding present for you,” he murmured - quiet, composed, but with his eyes full of emotion as compressed as the surface of a singularity.

“If it’s more jewelry ...” George threatened softly, though she brushed her fingers over the new platinum wedding band on her finger when she said it.

“Anthea.” That was all he said. Just her name. For the first time since she’d come to work for him, she had a moment of complete confusion after receiving an instruction - he’d given her nothing to conceal, nothing to produce at this moment.

Then she saw the flicker of understanding in George’s eyes, and the hint of a smile on those lips, and knew that it wasn’t an instruction but a description. An explanation of the gift.

“Not worthless,” George pointed out, but she was still smiling when she said it.

“No,” he agreed, still serious, “but it is our wedding day.”

George’s laugh was so soft and bright with amusement that Anthea couldn’t help but smile, in spite of the fluttering in her chest. “Anthea?” she asked softly, and she turned so that their eyes met. “Do you ...?”

“Yes,” she said, quickly - too quickly - and then with more composure. “Yes. I accept.” _I have accepted,_ she didn’t say. _I accepted when I had your blood on my hands._ It wasn’t appropriate wedding night conversation.

“Well, then.” George’s smile grew, turned a little wicked, and Anthea knew that she was in trouble before the words came. “Since we don’t have time for a pony before bed ....”

There was a brief moment in which Anthea was aware of Mycroft’s eyes widening before George kissed her for the second time. This time, she didn’t want to weep. This time it was perfect.

When it was over, finally, she did exactly what she’d told George she would do in the Ritz ballroom years ago - refreshed her lipstick and waited for Mycroft’s reaction.

“Well,” he said, eyes dark with something dangerous but a smile tugging at the edges of his mouth. Then he unlocked the door, picked George up in his arms and swept her up the stairs toward the bedroom.

Anthea locked up behind them, smiling to herself, and then headed up the stairs herself. Still anticipating the night off, of course, but she’d need to confirm it with her new employer. Not to mention clarification of the sleeping arrangements which George might wish to make.

It turned out, in hindsight, that Georgiana Lestrade became as accustomed to Anthea sharing the big bed in the master bedroom with her as Anthea did. Some nights, when Mycroft is home and George wants time alone with her husband, Anthea sleeps in one of the guest bedrooms. Most nights, though, she slips into the big bed and keeps George warm. Sometimes Mycroft is there, and sometimes he isn’t - he is still, after all, a very busy man.

Anthea is in the employ of the British Government, in the person of Mycroft Holmes, for whatever exigencies his wife may require.  She finds the arrangement extremely satisfactory.


End file.
